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Canadians are being put at risk by recent US health department cuts, according to an urgent editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).
Writing in the latest edition of the journal, the editors argue that the Trump administration’s recent dismantling of public health and research infrastructure “pose[s] immediate and long-term risks to the health of neighboring countries”.
Canadian governments should strengthen the country’s own health surveillance systems to prevent spread of communicable diseases, the editors say.
Health cuts crossing borders
Since coming into office in January, the Trump administration has pulled substantial funding from key US health institutions.
The budget for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been cut by 40%.
Thousands of employees have been fired from the country’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – although several hundred have since had their roles reinstated.
Some of the administration’s actions have been challenged and deemed “likely unlawful” by federal judges. Nonetheless, the effects of the cuts persist, and major health initiatives aimed at combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria remain weakened.
Writing in the CMAJ, the authors of the new editorial argue that the US cuts could harm the health of Canadians as well as Americans, as the mass firings and funding squeeze have “drastically reduced” the US’s capacity to collect and share health data with other countries.
“Cuts have included actions to paralyze evidence-based science, such as firing of personnel with the skills to develop tests for rapidly evolving diseases,” wrote the authors, Dr. Shannon Charlebois, the CMAJ’s medical editor, and Dr. Jasmine Pawa, a public health and preventive medicine specialist physician at the University of Toronto.
“This could affect, for example, the Canadian preclinical trials to treat filoviruses (e.g., Ebola virus) that depend on the import of antibodies generated by American scientists working in labs funded by the NIH,” they continued. “These actions pose immediate and long-term risks to the health of neighboring countries and to global health.”
In response, Charlebois and Pawa say that the Canadian government should strengthen the country’s health surveillance systems.
They suggest boosting data exchange between electronic medical and health records and utilizing “equity” data such as demographic, social, economic and geographic descriptors of the Canadian population. Further effort, they say, is also needed to clarify Canadian rates of vaccine coverage and antimicrobial resistance.
Combating health misinformation
The CMAJ editorial also criticizes individuals in the Trump administration “who seed misinformation and publicly discredit national health institutions adds to the effects of existing misinformation.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has come under particular criticism since his appointment for his history of promoting unfounded health conspiracies, notably around vaccines.
Charlebois and Pawa argue that Canadians are vulnerable to a “cross-border bleed” of such health misinformation as well as exposure to “biased US media.”
The authors cite a recent Canadian Medical Association’s 2025 Health and Media Tracking survey, which found that 43% of people in Canada were highly susceptible to believing misinformation, while another 35% were moderately susceptible.
To counter the spill-over of any health misinformation from south of the border, Charlebois and Pawa recommend Canadian health institutions curate more knowledge that can be provided for “content for plain-language knowledge translators in public media.”
Reference: Charlebois S, Pawa J. Tackling communicable disease surveillance and misinformation in Canada. CMAJ. 2025. doi: 10.1503/cmaj.250916